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2 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5
Hardt and Negri studiously ignore every analysis that has been writ-
ten in this regard, not only by Marxists but also by other schools of polit-
ical economy. Instead, they take up the legalism of a Maruice Duverger
or the vulgar political science of Anglo-Saxon empiricism. Thus “imperi-
alism” becomes a common characteristic shared across space and time
by various “Empires,” such as the Roman, Ottoman, British or French
colonial, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Soviet. The inevitable collapse
of these empires is related to “analogous causes.” This is much closer to
a superficial journalism than to any serious reading of history. But again,
they pander to the current fashion (after “the fall of the Berlin Wall”).
There is no question that the evolution of capitalism and the world
system in the course of the last twenty years has involved qualitative
transformations in all areas. It is another thing to subscribe to the dom-
inant discourse according to which the “scientific and technological”
revolution will, by itself, produce forms of economic and political man-
agement of the planet that “surpass” those associated, until recently,
with the defense of “national interests” and, further, that this evolution
would be “positive.” This discourse proceeds on the basis of serious sim-
plifications. The dominant segments of capital indeed operate in the
transnational space of world capitalism, but control of these segments
remains in the hands of financial groups still strongly “national” (i.e.,
based in the United States or Great Britain or Germany, but not yet in a
“Europe” that does not exist as such on this level). Moreover, the eco-
nomic reproduction of the system is, today as yesterday, unthinkable
without the parallel implementation of the “politics” that modulate its
variants. The capitalist economy does not exist without a “state,” except
in the ideological and empty vulgate of liberalism. There is still no
transnational, “world” state. The true questions, evaded by the domi-
nant discourse of globalization, concern the contradictions between the
logics of the globalized accumulation of central capitalism’s dominant
segments (the “oligopolies”) and those governing the “politics” of the
system.
Hardt and Negri’s system, presented under the pleasant-sounding
term “Empire,” proceeds, then, from the naïve vision of globalization
offered by the dominant discourse. In this vision, transnationalization
has already abolished imperialism (and imperialism in conflict), replac-
ing it with a system in which the center is both nowhere and every-
where. The center/periphery opposition (that defines the imperialist
relation) is already “surpassed.” Hardt and Negri here take up the com-
monplace discourse in which, since there is a “first world” of “wealth”
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in the “third world” and a “third world” of poverty in the first, there is
no point in opposing the first and third worlds to each other. Certainly
there are wealthy and poor in India, just as in the United States, since
we all still live in class divided societies integrated into world capital-
ism. Does that mean that the social formations of India and the United
States are identical? Does the distinction between the active role of some
in shaping the world and the passive role of others, who can only
“adjust” to the requirements of the globalized system, have no meaning?
In reality, this distinction is more pertinent today than ever. In the ear-
lier phase of contemporary history (1945–1980), the relations of force
between the imperialist countries and the dominated countries were
such that the “development” of the peripheries was on the agenda, leav-
ing open the possibility for the latter to assert themselves as active
agents in the transformation of the world. Today these relations have
changed dramatically in favor of dominant capital. The discourse of
development has disappeared and been replaced by that of “adjust-
ment.” In other words, the current world system (the “Empire”) is not
less imperialist but more imperialist than its predecessor!
Hardt and Negri would have realized this if they had only taken note
of what the representatives of dominant capital have written. As incred-
ible as it may appear, they have not done that at all. However, all major
parts of the U.S. establishment (Democrats and Republicans) make no
secret of the objectives of their plan: to monopolize access to the plan-
et’s natural resources in order to continue their wasteful mode of life,
even if this is to the detriment of other peoples; to prevent any large or
mid-sized power from becoming a competitor capable of resisting
Washington’s orders; and to achieve these aims by military control of the
planet.
Hardt and Negri have simply taken up the current discourse in which,
“nationalism” and “communism” having been definitively defeated, the
return of a globalized liberalism constitutes objective progress. The
“insufficiencies” of the system, if there are any, can only be corrected
from within the logic of the system itself and not by combating it. Thus
it is easy to understand the reasons why Negri has joined the ranks of
Atlanticist Europe and called for supporting its project of an ultra-liber-
al constitution subservient to Washington. But the real history of
“nationalism” and “communism” has nothing in common with what lib-
eral propaganda says about it. The social transformations inspired by
nationalism and communism across three decades in the welfare state of
the western social democracies, in the countries of really existing social-
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spective that any defeat involves leads to ephemeral unrest and the pro-
fusion of para-theoretical propositions that both legitimate that unrest
and give rise to the belief that it constitutes an “effective” means for
“transforming the world” (even without wanting to), in the good sense
of the term moreover. One can only gradually solidify new formulations
that are both coherent and effective by distancing oneself from the past,
rather than proposing a “remake” of it, and by effectively integrating
new realities produced by social evolution in all its dimensions. Such
contributions, both debatable and diverse, certainly exist. I do not
include Hardt and Negri’s discourse among them.
The propositions that Hardt and Negri draw from their discourse on
the “multitude” bear witness, even in their very formulation, to the
impasse in which they are trapped. The first of these propositions con-
cerns democracy that, for the first time in history, is supposedly on the
verge of becoming a real possibility on the global scale. Moreover, the
multitude is defined as the “constitutive” force of democracy. This is a
wonderfully naïve proposition. Are we moving in this direction? Beyond
a few superficial appearances (some elections here or there), which obvi-
ously satisfy the liberal powers (particularly Washington), democra-
cy—both necessary and possible—is in crisis. It is threatened with
losing its legitimacy to the advantage of religious or ethnic fundamen-
talisms (I do not consider the ethnocratic regimes of the former
Yugoslavia as democratic progress!). Do elections that overturn the
power of one criminal gang (for example, one in the service of the
Russian autocracy) to replace it with another one (financed by the CIA!)
constitute progress for democracy or a manipulated farce? Is not the
unfolding of the imperialist project for control of the planet at the origin
of the frontal attacks that are reducing basic democratic rights in the
United States? Is not the liberal consensus in Europe, around which the
major political forces of right and left have united, in the process of dele-
gitimizing electoral procedures? Hardt and Negri are silent on all these
questions.
The second proposition concerns the “diversity of the multitude.” But
the forms and contents that define the (diverse) components of the mul-
titude are barely specified any more than are the forces that produce
and/or reduce this diversity. Major contradictions consequently traverse
all of Hardt and Negri’s texts. For example, the current globalization,
according to them, is supposed to reduce the “differences” between cen-
ters and peripheries (otherwise this globalization would remain imperi-
alist). The real world is evolving in the exact opposite direction by
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tion for Hardt and Negri, writes that this revolution opens the era of the
“unlimited quest for political liberty.” Today, the emergence of the mul-
titude, the constitutive force of a democracy “possible for the first time
on the world scale,” crowns the (positive) victory of the
“Americanization of the world.”
The rallying to American liberalism is necessarily accompanied by the
devaluation of the different paths of other nations, in particular of “old
Europe,” as formulated by Hannah Arendt when she counterposed the
American Revolution to the “limited struggle against poverty and
inequality” to which she reduces the French Revolution. In the Cold War
era, all the great revolutions of modern times (French, Russian, and
Chinese) had to be denigrated. They were vitiated from the beginning by
their “totalitarian tendency,” according to the American liberal dis-
course that became the spearhead of the counterrevolution after the
Second World War. The exclusive survival of the “American model,”
whose pioneering revolution and constitution did not question any of
the necessities of capitalist development, implied that the heritage of
those revolutions that had indeed questioned capitalist exigencies (as
was the case beginning with the Jacobin radicalization of the French
Revolution) was repudiated. The denunciation of the French Revolution
(François Furet), banal anti-Sovietism, and the charges brought against
Maoism constitute some of the major planks of this counterrevolution in
political culture.
Now in this area Hardt and Negri remain utterly silent. They system-
atically ignore all the critical literature (a large part of it from the United
States, moreover) on the American Revolution that established a long
time ago that the Constitution of the United States was systematically
constructed to rule out all danger of a “popular” deviation. The success
in this sense is real, arousing the envy of all the European reactionaries
who never succeeded in doing it (Giscard d’Estaing said that the con-
stitution of the ultra-liberal European project was “as good” as the U.S.
Constitution!).
The “aspirations” of the multitude established as the constitutive
force of the future are reduced to very little: freedom, particularly to emi-
grate, and the right to a socially guaranteed income. In the undoubted
care not to venture outside what is permitted by American liberalism,
the project deliberately ignores everything that could be qualified as the
heritage of the workers’ and socialist movement, in particular the equal-
ity rejected by the political culture of the United States. It is difficult to
believe in the transformative power of an emerging global (and
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the United States is a product of the conquest of the West (which leads
to considering all other peoples as “redskins” who have the right to live
only on condition of not hindering the United States). The new imperi-
alist project of the U.S. ruling class requires a redoubling of an aggres-
sive nationalism, which henceforth becomes the dominant ideology and
recalls the Europe of 1914 rather than the Europe of today. On every level,
the United States is not “in advance” of “old Europe,” but a century
behind. This is why the “American model” is favored by the right and
unfortunately by segments of the left, including Hardt and Negri, who
have been won over to liberalism at the present time.
Beyond the two theses of Empire (“imperialism is outmoded”) and
Multitude (“the individual has become the subject of history”), Hardt
and Negri’s discourse exhibits a tone of resignation. There is no alterna-
tive to submission to the exigencies of the current phase of capitalist
development. One will only be able to combat its damaging conse-
quences by becoming integrated into it. This is the discourse of our
moment of defeat, a moment that has not yet been surpassed. This is the
discourse of social democracy won over to liberalism, of pro-Europeans
won over to Atlanticism. The renaissance of a left worthy of the name,
capable of inspiring and implementing progress for the benefit of the
people, requires a radical rupture with discourses of this type.